Dr. Billy Taylor, “America's Classical Music,”

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Apollo 1 Dr. Billy Taylor, “America’s Classical Music,” and the Role of the Jazz Ambassador Tom Arnold-Forster Jesus College, Cambridge [email protected] Abstract The idea of jazz as “America’s classical music” has become a powerful way of defining the music, asserting its national and artistic value, and shaping its scholarly study. The present article provides a history of this idea through a close analysis of its primary theorist and most visible spokesperson, Dr. Billy Taylor. It argues that the idea was not a neoclassical and conservative product of the 1980s, but had important roots in the Black Arts imperatives of the later 1960s and early 1970s. It suggests that Taylor initially made the idea work inventively and productively in a variety of contexts, especially through his community arts project Jazzmobile, but these contexts diverged as he was stretched thin across and beyond the United States. The idea’s disintegration into clichéd ubiquity in the mid-1980s then provides a critical perspective on the idea of the “jazz renaissance,” and an opportunity to consider the role of the jazz ambassador in the context of debates about African American intellectuals. 2 “America’s classical music” has been a prominent answer to the persistent question of what jazz is. It challenges the drugs-and-brothels imagery that has long lingered around the music, and it rejects, perhaps too confidently, the notion that jazz is essentially enigmatic. In 1984, the critic Grover Sales published Jazz: America’s Classical Music, which pronounced the music a grand artistic heritage. For Sales, jazz was a “miraculous cathedral” for all Americans, which “served as a fulcrum to overturn centuries-old fears and misunderstandings between white and black America that poisoned our national life.” 1 In this upbeat vision, appealing narratives of art and nation subsumed sticky questions of race. Sales was not alone. From the mid-1980s, many critics and musicians presented affirmative, elevating, and tradition-conscious ideas of jazz, which were so conspicuous that it has become usual to periodize the years since as a “jazz renaissance.” Pre-eminent in this era are the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch, and their founding of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Even politicians got involved. In 1987, the U.S. Congress passed the Jazz Preservation Act, which declared the music “a rare and valuable national American treasure.”2 And, in 1993, Bill Clinton told a White House gathering that “jazz is really America’s classical music.”3 Scholars were sceptical. “There is a revolution underway in jazz that lies not in any internal crisis of style,” argued Scott DeVeaux in 1991, “but in the debate over the looming new orthodoxy: jazz as ‘America’s classical music.’” The idea imposed “a kind of deadening uniformity of cultural meaning on the music.” Its narratives were suffocating, its nationalism sickly. It strangled attempts to make the study of 1 Grover Sales, Jazz: America’s Classical Music (New York: Prentice Hall, 1984), 4-6. 2 H.R. 57, 100th Congress (1987); see also Jeff Farley, “Jazz as a Black American Art Form: Definitions of the Jazz Preservation Act,” Journal of American Studies Volume 24, No 1 (February 2011), 113-29. 3 Bill Clinton, “Remarks on the 40th Anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival,” 18 Jun. 1993, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 16 Vols. (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1994-2001), Vol. 1, 883. 3 jazz “more responsive to issues of historical particularity.”4 DeVeaux’s argument became an influential “clarion call,” with many concurring that jazz histories “need not follow the narrative trajectory that many have constructed for ‘classical music.’”5 Researchers began to draw on history, musicology, American studies, sociology, and literary criticism. They uncovered hidden histories, refused grand narratives, and focussed on the complexity of cultural meaning. In the “new jazz studies,” impatience with “America’s classical music” became habitual. The idea was jazz’s “favorite dictum,” a “frequently invoked phrase,” a piece of “high-art dogma,” one of the “pious clichés” that existed about the music.6 By 2002, it was observed that “the once common notion that jazz might be thought of as ‘America’s classical music’ has long been discredited.”7 But beneath the dismissals lay hesitancy. Many were wary of tackling a narrative that had done much to elevate the music, and which had certainly helped to legitimize the study of jazz in universities.8 DeVeaux put his anxieties in parentheses: “(it hardly seems fair, in any case, to deconstruct a narrative that has only recently been constructed, especially one that serves such important purposes).”9 “It may be a little unfair,” echoed Krin Gabbard, “to deconstruct a canonical view of jazz history 4 Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature Forum Volume 25, No 3 (Autumn 1991), 553. 5 John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 13; David Ake, Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 81. The most recent analysis and critique of DeVeaux is Sherrie Tucker, “Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition: The ‘Subjectless Subject’ of New Jazz Studies,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 264-80. 6 Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 587; DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” 525; David Ake, Jazz Matters: Sound, Place, and Time since Bebop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 5; Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool, 374. 7 Mervyn Cooke, “Jazz Among the Classics, and the Case of Duke Ellington,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 153. 8 See Tucker, “Deconstructing the Jazz Tradition,” 267-69. 9 DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” 553. 4 so soon after it has been constructed.”10 So a peculiar ambiguity emerged amongst the scholars. “America’s classical music” represented everything jazz studies sought to move beyond, but was not much lingered over. It was simply summoned to stand for the suspect arguments of “such prominent spokespeople for jazz as Billy Taylor, Wynton Marsalis, and Gunther Schuller,” or “Grover Sales, Reginald Buckner, and many others.”11 Or Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, Ken Burns, the Jazz Preservation Act, American exceptionalism, neoclassicism, neotraditionalism, neoliberalism, indeed the entire “jazz renaissance.” In academic circles, “America’s classical music” became a truly “once common notion”: a straw man regularly wheeled out for a good duffing up, but kept well stuffed for the sake of the music and the field. It remains an important idea poorly understood, routinely invoked but rarely interrogated. There is a need to probe its origins, untangle its meanings, and explore its influence. For these tasks, the pianist and educator Billy Taylor is useful. He certainly claimed to have coined the phrase, though it has sometimes been attributed to Duke Ellington or James Baldwin.12 What is clear is that Taylor was the idea’s primary theorist and most visible spokesperson. He produced its first formal rendering in his 1975 doctoral dissertation, and went on to articulate it across a range of forums as America’s premier jazz ambassador before Wynton Marsalis. Scholarship on Taylor is small. The brief discussions that do exist tend to cast him as an elder statesman of the jazz renaissance: Robert Walser anthologizes Taylor’s ideas in “The Eighties,” 10 Krin Gabbard, “The Jazz Canon and Its Consequences,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 18. 11 Robert Walser, “‘Out of Notes’: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, 170; George Lipsitz, Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 85. See also Ake, Jazz Cultures, 163; Ake, Jazz Matters, 183n4; DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” 553n1. 12 Martha Bayles, “What’s Wrong with Being Classical?” Antioch Review Volume 57, No 3 (Summer 1999), 318; Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 17. 5 while Eric Porter aligns them with those of Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis.13 This article puts Taylor center stage. He enables a close contextual analysis of the idea of jazz as “America’s classical music,” and a careful account of its use across a range of cultural arenas within and beyond the United States. He also offers an opportunity to consider the role of the jazz ambassador in the context of debates about the place of, and challenges facing, African Americans intellectuals in the later twentieth century.14 For Taylor reveals, in unusual depth, what is involved in the jazz ambassador’s struggle to make words about music do things. William Edward Taylor Jr. was born into a middle class and musical family in 1921 and grew up in a segregated Washington, DC. He concentrated on the piano from a young age, was taught by Dunbar High School bandleader Henry Grant (who also taught Ellington), and studied first

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